Interface Sign to Serial Port Interface

A standard 6 wire telephone cable meant for a two line phone is used (a 4 wire one will not work) Plug one end into the sign, and one end into the Quick port RJ-12 Jack. Wire the jack into the serial port board as such[3]

MODE TAG and COLORTAG

The key parts of this are the MODE TAG and COLORTAG, there is full documentation available for this[5][6]but here are the pertinent parts.

MODE TAG

a

Regular smooth scroll, right to left

b

Appear. Centers as much of message on screen, waits, and displays rest of message in similar manner

c

Appear with flashing.

d

Auto. Randomly picks an effect for each part of the message, as opposed to the message as a whole.

e

Scroll up.

f

Scroll down from top.

g

Jerky scroll from right to left.

h

Jerky scroll from left to right.

i

Wipe up from bottom, covering text.

j

Wipe down from top, covering text.

k

Wipe over from right to left, character by character, not by pixels.

l

Wipe over from left to right, character by character.

m

Scroll up. Same as 'e'?

n

This is doing something weird based on message itself. Will have to investigate.

o

Auto/Random (same as 'd'?)

p

--> CENTER <-- Text appears at sides and squishes content in.

q

<-- CENTER --> Text splits in center and pushed content out.

r

--> COVER <-- New text covers old out to in.

s

<-- UNCOVER --> New text uncovers in to out.

t

Compressed text! Using this mode the sign tricks your eyes into seeing more characters than it is capable of physically producing. Scrolls right to left.

u

Fast Appear.

v

Medium Appear.

w

Maybe medium-slow appear.

x

Same as 'p'?

y

Same as 'q'?

z

Same as 'r'?

@

The sign went blank.

COLORTAG

1

Red

2

Green

3

Amber

4

Dim red

5

Dim green

6

Brown

7

Orange

8

Yellow

9

Rainbow 1

A

Rainbow 2

B

Color mix

C

Autocolor

Stock Ticker

The sign can be used for a number of purposes (to display weather forecasts from an RSS feed, to display news feeds as a news ticker) As a proof of concept the following script uses the sign to display a stock ticker that gets it's data from yahoo. It then colors the prices

GREEN if they are positive/up

and

RED if they are negative/down

for the day.

Here it is in action: (clip from a cell phone so quality is somewhat poor)